…One of my favorite things about HDR is how easy it makes it…to create really compelling and very…hot looking light elements without much effort.…Here we have a scene that is created in HDR over an LDR plate.…If I roll down on my exposure control, you see the nice decay to the beam element.…And you don't see that in the background scene, it…just turns gray because it was shot on a DSLR.…Looking into the pre comp, that beam element just…consists of a bunch of solids and shape layers.…

What they have in common is that they use either opacity that's below 100 or…a blur effect, or several of them, to create a lot of thresholds.…Those thresholded layers are then boosted an exposure.…So without the exposure, it just looks like the ordinary element.…But in HDR, it turns into this amazing looking thing.…If I go to 8 or 16 bit, there's…still something happening, but there is also a lot lost.…Now, you're probably use to seeing this if you just simply…use an exposure effect to try to create this kind of effect.…And so what you end up doing is compensating.…

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Released

6/16/2014

Compositing is all about matching, and in this course we go beyond the fundamentals of matching foreground and background, into the realm of the truly cinematic. Learn how to use the Curves control to surpass what is possible with any other color-adjustment tool in After Effects. Discover how to match the full conditions of the shot as the camera sees it, including back lighting, lens distortion, and other lens and frame-rate artifacts. To make a shot or sequence that belongs in your movie, you need to know how to flatten the shot so that you can use tools such as Magic Bullet Mojo or Looks to make it look truly cinematic. But even beyond making it flat, it's best for it to have the full depth and response of color as we see it in the natural world, and that requires the use of 32-bit-per-channel HDR. And for maximum drama, you want to be able to play with time itself, and motion blur as well. In this course, Mark Christiansen takes you through all these scenarios and the next step in After Effects compositing: matching a shot and making it look not only realistic, but cinematic.